Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  The noise of talk, chewing, spitting and complaining was enough to deafen the dead, and yet Becket did not regret his cell in the Tower where, he had to admit, the food had been far better. Here at least there were other men to look on and things to watch. Absurdly, he began to feel happy. At the other table where they were serving the Knights’ Commons, he saw the women sitting and discoursing and spent a pleasant few minutes speculating about uses that pretty buttons could be put to in a prison.

  Please, Lord, please, he prayed silently while one of Newton’s servants gabbled out another grace, and he laughed when Simon followed his gaze and flushed.

  In the afternoon he spent an hour constructing a web of laces to hold his leg-chains off the ground and stop them from tripping him up and then shuffled to the other end of the courtyard to find out what was causing the circle of cheering men. It turned out to be a rat fight, with two brutes the size of cats hissing and squeaking at each other in a ring made of the masonry blocks by which some of the men were hobbled. Becket watched for a while and put sixpence on the smaller of the two, on the grounds he had more to fight for and nimbler paws and gave better odds. He lost, which depressed Becket greatly as he struggled back to the step where he had left Simon.

  The clerk had taken chalk and cleared straw from a space on the cobbles. He was busily chalking marks and shapes on it.

  “What’s this?” Becket asked curiously. “Witchcraft?”

  Simon sighed. “No,” he said. “Only the Cabbala.”

  Becket grunted and squatted to look closer. “What’s the design?”

  “The Tree of Life.”

  “What does it prophesy?”

  “It prophesies nothing. I am not trying to prognosticate the future.”

  “What then?”

  Simon sighed again. “It will no doubt seem a strange thing to do, but I am trying to understand the world.”

  “With chalkmarks?”

  “I wonder if you recall the sayings of Copernicus about the movement of the earth about the sun?”

  “Not that old song again, Simon. How can such a thing be? What would hold up the earth? Depend upon it, the sun and moon are lights in the sky, as they always have been.” Becket was vehement because the whole idea always made him feel queasy.

  “Perhaps the earth is carried on a crystal sphere like the other planets.”

  “Pooh. What would the sphere be made of? And why would we not hear of it from travellers? Surely someone would have bumped into it by now. Think what a tale it would make. ‘As I journeyed in foreign lands I fetched up of a sudden against an endless wall of crystal . . .’”

  “Perhaps it is the sea, dividing one from the other.”

  “ ‘ . . . and our ship rammed against a solid but invisible thing.’ Someone would have found it. For God’s sake, Drake would have found it while he was sailing around the earth and burning Spaniards in their beds.”

  “Your objection is a good one. I had asked the same question a little differently: if the earth is held on a sphere, then how come the moon can go round without breaking it?”

  “Well, there you are. Clearly the thing is nonsense and Copernicus was a little distempered by drink when he published the thing.”

  “And yet mathematically it is beautiful. Mathematically it –“

  “Mathematics this, mathematics that . . . You talk as if numbers were Holy Writ.”

  “Perhaps they are.” Becket saw that Simon was flushed with anger, as if his woman had been insulted. “See here,” he rapped out. “I draw a right-angled triangle, and upon this and this side a square, divided in four, and if I add the two together, then they will give me the size of the third square, which will always, always, no matter where I draw it or what condition of man I am, it will always thereby give me the length of this side of the triangle. Always. It is true and it is provable; what more could you ask of Holy Writ?”

  “Pff. That is only an old soldier’s trick for finding out the right length to make a siege-ladder. What makes that Holy Writ?”

  “Its simplicity, its universality.”

  “And what has it to do with crystal spheres?”

  “Everything,” murmured Simon, gazing down at his diagram in frustration. “If only I could understand it.”

  “What does it matter? Who cares if the earth goes about the sun or the sun about the earth?”

  “Matter? Tell me, Becket, who made the world?”

  “God made the world, everyone knows that; it is in the catechism.”

  “Agreed. In which case the world must in some way reflect the mind of the Almighty. Yes?”

  “Why? If a courtier poet writes of living as a shepherd in Arcadia or some like tedious foolishness, does that mean he has been a shepherd?”

  “No, but–”

  “A Popish painter draws Heaven upon a church wall: has he been to Heaven? Is Heaven in his mind? By looking at his limning, shall we learn what manner of man he is?”

  “No, admittedly, but . . .”

  Becket jangled aggressively as he wagged his finger at Simon. “This is the arrogance of the clever man,” he said. “Here is logic, true, but you have forgot that to make something new which was not made before has more than logic in it. It has a touch of divinity.”

  “You are reading me a lesson I already know,” Simon said hotly. “I would never claim to confine the Almighty by logic–”

  “But you just have. The world was made by God. Therefore, to know God’s mind, study the world. Yes? A syllogism, though I forget which kind.”

  “Where would you have me study the mind of the Almighty then, eh, Becket? In the Bible?”

  “Why not? Better men than I am have done so.”

  “The Bible says nothing of the earth going round the sun.”

  Becket leaned forwards with his face reddening. “Because it’s not true,” he bellowed. “The sun goes round the earth, always had, always will. Look up there and you can see it in its course.”

  “Bah,” snorted Simon. “What about the cycles and epicycles upon Aristotle’s explanation? How can the Almighty have made a thing so ugly and unbalanced when He also made this,” he gestured fiercely at his Pythagoras theorem, “and this.” With his chalk he drew a circle and wrote letters within.

  “Maimonides saith, ‘To know the size of ground within the circle, take the radius, square it and multiply it by seven twenty-thirds, a number which is as infinitely changeable as the mind of the Almighty itself . . .’”

  “Why would I want to do that? Will that get me out of here? No. Then what good is it?”

  Simon threw down the chalk and glared at Becket, who glared back.

  “All this with circles and triangles,” he growled. “If I knew no better, I would think you a pagan Greek, not a Jew.”

  Simon turned his head sharply. “How did you know I am a Jew? I never told you.”

  Becket screwed up his face and then shook his head. “The Cabbala?”

  “Dr Dee is a famous Cabbalist and a Christian. How did you know?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  They stared at each other. Becket’s belly gave a great triumphant rumble which broke their irritation with one another and he grinned ruefully at the commentary.

  “Do we get supper?”

  “Sometimes,” said Simon. “If you like stockfish that last saw the ocean in Queen Mary’s reign.”

  Becket shuddered. “Good God, not stockfish; I cannot abide the stuff. So shall we finish our good manchet loaf or keep it till tomorrow and risk being robbed of it, Mr Anriques?” he asked more peaceably.

  “Eat it,” said Simon at once.

  They had finished the last of it and Simon had gone off to refill the bottle at the water-seller’s barrel. Becket was trying to devise a way to scratch the small of his back where a flea had bitten him. It maddened him because the chain between his wrists was just too short to let him reach. Finally he scraped back against a doorpost like a bear. While he was immersed in that simple
pleasure a shadow fell over him and he looked up at Joachim Newton.

  “Mr Strangways,” said the gaoler. Becket looked blank for a moment.

  “That is . . . er . . . yes.”

  Newton was waiting for something, so he stood up and made a moderately respectful bow.

  “Put your hands out.”

  Suppressing his instant instinctive swoop of terror at the order, Becket did so. The keys rattled, the manacles unlocked and at last he could stretch his arms and rub some more feeling into his hands.

  “Ahh,” he said, “I shall remember your kindness, Mr Newton.”

  Newton made a fist and held it under Becket’s nose while his three henchmen surrounded Becket and looked as ugly as they could.

  “You get no ideas from this, Strangways,” he snarled. “These irons still have your name on them and I’ll keep them safe for you, never fear. Just because you have a friend in here that pays garnish for you and has some pull at Court don’t mean I favour you.”

  “No, sir,” said Becket quietly, addressing the fist. “I shall do my best not to offend.” Newton took back his fist and put it on his sword-hilt. “My legs . . .”

  “Your legs stay as they are. Not all the garnish in the world will take them cramp-rings off. They’re on your warrant, and if I loose you from them I must answer for it to my lord Burghley.”

  While they were talking, Simon Anriques had come back unnoticed and was standing where he could hear, listening intently.

  “So,” said Newton triumphantly, “we understand each other.”

  “Perfectly, sir,” said Becket, still quietly.

  Newton stumped off, spinning the cuffs on their chains suggestively, and kicking a child in colourful rags playing knuckle-bones by the gate as he went. Fortunately he was too full of importance to notice the copious spittle from Becket that followed him. The keys rattled and the gate crashed behind him.

  Becket gave Simon a tense smile. “Jesus, that’s better,” he said and stretched his arms voluptuously as far to the sides as they would go. “Ahhh.” He flexed his fingers, rubbed them together, circled his arms, linked his hands behind his head and stretched his shoulder muscles until the creaked. “I would put even the taking off of a breastplate second behind the taking off of manacles, eh, Simon?”

  Simon was muttering to himself, a peculiar expression on his face as he sat down on the step in the setting sun’s long shadow and twiddled his thumbs.

  “I am indebted to you; was that what you were about when . . .” Becket said and paused. He would have gone on, but cunning stopped him. Why blabber out what he had just understood with Newton’s help? So it was a strangely convenient thing that he should be put in the Fleet and wind up sharing a bed with a friend? He knew that all about him strange puissant shadows moved and countermoved against each other, and as a pawn there was no reason in the world why anyone should tell him what they were doing. But if this Simon Anriques was some species of informer set to question him under the guise of friendship, then why let the man know he had been spotted? And if he was not, but a genuine friend indeed, why insult him and perhaps offend him mortally?

  He laughed and clapped Simon on the back, not quite accidentally nearly knocking him over, and offered him a sip from the aqua vitae bottle to celebrate.

  XLIV

  SO OFTEN A SIN is expedient; the blacker it is, the more expedient it seems. Poor child. If there had been anyone Bethany could have spoken to, or anywhere she could have taken refuge or anything she could do at all, save what she did . . .

  Mary also believed she could do nothing else. Should she let the girl be attended by Julia or Kate, who knew so little? Bethany had threatened to kill herself, to cut her wrists and kill the babe and herself both. She offered good money, which Mary had need of suddenly.

  But this was one sin Mary had not committed since she shrived herself to Father Hart, and it took her most of the bottle of aqua vitae she carried to bring herself to agree to it.

  Bethany crept over the palace orchard wall in the middle of the night, her heart banging in a sick whirling terror, so that she was afraid it might echo through the empty passage ways. She was dressed in her tiring-woman’s kirtle and she had dosed the woman herself and both of the other girls in her room with laudanum. She carried gold under her cloak and counted it a great mercy that the Thames was still frozen, so she needed no boat.

  I rested on a cloud and wept crystal tears for her, so that she was speckled with white and shivering when she came into the back room of the Falcon, and this was the bravest thing she had done in all her short life. In the smoky light of tapers she looked away from Mary, who swayed muttering on her stool, and when Julia told her to, she put the money on the table, took all her clothes off and her shift as well, so it would not be marked. Then, with her teeth chattering, she climbed on the straw-covered bed and opened her legs. Kate and Julia held her down, as Mary ordered them. For the pain was very bad.

  At last it was done. When she would walk reasonably straight, and was clothed again, Kate led her out and helped her back all the long way to Whitehall, a long icy road through the centre of the sleeping City, and the tears freezing on her face. For all her hardness, Kate had pity for her and let her rest as much as she desired, being also careful to see that there was no blood in their tracks that might give them away. There were a few spots she missed, but they were thankfully licked up by starving rats well before dawn.

  Bethany went to her bed as quietly as she could, huddled up under all her blankets in the soft down-filled darkness, while the others snored their way through golden vivid dreams. She shook and wept silently at the pain in her groin and the pain and emptiness in her belly. At last the mantle of my mercy went over her and she dozed a little before dawn came at last, and all four of them overslept.

  XLV

  BECKET TOO WAS PLAGUED by dreams. He had caught it, though it snarled at him and swung its horn, and had schooled it on a lunging rein in a churchyard, in the midst of a wide flat land scarred with burnt houses and ruined fields. The unicorn leapt nimbly over the gravestones, and when he looked up again, the world was blotted out by fog. Then he had brought a golden saddle for it and the unicorn had suffered him to put it on its back, and with a strange high certainty he had swung himself up and found the stirrups just as the unicorn screamed in rage and began to buck. He rode it, whooping, hand tight on the pommel while the sky darkened and the circle of soldiers watching him cheered him on. Sir Philip Sidney smiled at his prowess and led the Queen into the ring. There she stood, blazing with jewels and smiling strangely at him. Father Hart stepped out too, and made the sign of the cross, blessing him and smiling. His dreaming self knew the man and wished to smile back, to make up for the fact that his waking self was still mired in ignorance. But such smiles enraged the unicorn further, and while Becket fought desperately with the suddenly tangled reins, the unicorn lowered its horn and charged squarely at the Queen in all her velvet magnificence, stabbing her deep in her breast, breaking her in pieces with his tossing and riding over her. Becket found one of her broken hands caught in his own and woke sweating out of his dream.

  He still had hold of a bony hand, though this one was still attached to its owner, whose breath stank in his face. Someone was trying to steal his little bundle of possessions.

  He reacted without thought, flung his arm around the man’s neck, rolled off the bed on top of him and headbutted viciously. There was a bubbling animal-like cry, he kneed upwards as hard as he could and was rewarded by a whoof of charnel breath. Whoever it was went limp.

  “What was that?” asked Simon’s voice beside him, sharp with fright.

  Becket was panting for breath and greatly pleased with himself as he got up off the floor.

  “Some God-damned thief,” he growled.

  Simon was fumbling with his tinder-box, striking flint on steel and managing to light a stub of wax candle. In the flame they saw other eyes watching and Becket could look at the human skeleton he ha
d just bested. That diminished his victory, because from the look of him the man should barely have been able to walk. He was writhing silently, bleeding from the nose.

  “Stupid bastard,” Becket said in disgust and then looked round at the watchers. “Anyone else want to try it?” he demanded aggressively. One pair of eyes after another looked away. “Which one of you put him up to it, eh?”

  Everyone was lying down again, busily asleep. Simon was still holding up his stub of candle. Becket was revolted at the sores visible through the rents in the man’s ragged shirt and hose, the pressure of the man’s bones against his blue skin.

  “Christ have mercy,” he said to himself and then to Simon: “Blow it out, damn you; when will you get another candle?”

  Simon blew quickly and stopped the glowing end with a licked finger. “It is the man with the fever,” he said. “I heard he is being moved to the beggar’s ward tomorrow, since he has no money left.”

  The man was now sobbing and coughing cavernously. His hot, bony hands were plucking at Becket again. Becket pushed him away.

  “God damn you, what do you want?”

  He was whispering something, Unwillingly, Becket bent as close as he could bear the stink to hear him. “Cold,” the man was saying, “cold.” Shivering rattled what was left of his teeth.

  “No doubt he wanted your shirt to cover him,” Simon said impersonally out of the darkness beside him, lying down once more. “After all, you have two.”

  “Christ’s guts,” muttered Becket. He stayed sitting on the side of the bed for minutes together, listening to the man’s sobbing, staring at the freezing darkness. At last, after looking around furtively to be sure no one was watching, he unwrapped his other shirt from his pipe, tobacco pouch and bottle, and put it in the sick man’s hands. As an afterthought he fished a shilling out of the roll round his middle and handed that over as well. “Go away, for God’s sake,” he whispered.